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bread with a capital “B”
By Lyn Kidder photography by Frederic Moras
Bakers start work early. But while her bread is baking, Glynis Racine can watch deer and rabbits as the sun comes up on the Capitan Mountains.
“I can’t imagine a better place to be baking than this," she says.
Baking Day starts with raking out the coals from a wood fire that has burned in the brick oven since yesterday. Then more than 100 loaves of artisan bread take their turns baking on the heated stone hearth.
“This method is romance versus the practical,” she says, laughing.
“In some ways, it would be easier to use a conventional oven. There are a lot of variables doing it this way, but I’m a perfectionist and I enjoy the challenge.”
Racine makes a combination of sourdough loaves and baguettes, seeded multi-grain, sun-dried tomato, sprouted wheat berry and pecan raisin breads. She uses high-quality organic flours, sea salt and as many organic ingredients as possible. “The seeded multi-grain bread has flax, sesame and sunflower seeds and is 100 percent organic,” she says. Racine and her husband Marty moved to Capitan in 1998 and discovered that “there wasn’t a decent loaf of bread to be found.” Racine, who had always been interested in baking, went to the San Francisco Baking Institute to learn artisan baking. Her teacher, Jeffrey Yankellow, went on to win the gold medal at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie (the World Cup of Baking) as a team member with the Bread Bakers Guild. “I [feel] like I had been trained by the best,” Racine says.
The couple then went to British Columbia to a seminar by Alan Scott, guru of brick oven construction and baking.
“I thought, ‘that would be really fun’– I get a lot of crazy ideas,” she said. Scott himself came to help them build their brick oven. "It took five of us a week to build it,” she remembered. The oven is housed in a 1,000 square-foot adobe building that the couple built a few hundred yards from their house. Modern bakery equipment stands beside more rustic tools – long wooden paddles for removing bread from the oven, cane proofing baskets and a leather bellows for tending the fire. Flours and other perishables are kept in a refrigerated adobe room. Tomatoes– destined to be part of the sun-dried tomato bread–ripen on a sunny windowsill. A ceramic tile of San Pasqual, patron saint of the kitchen, hangs on the wall. “I figured I needed all the help I could get,” she said.
Racine starts the baking process by feeding the starter enough flour and water to get it ready. The next day, she mixes the doughs, lets them rise for four hours and then shapes the loaves. The loaves–in their proofing baskets—sit overnight in the refrigerated room.
“The sourdough process is a longer fermentation than yeast," Racine said. “I can increase or decrease the amount of acidity—the ‘sourness’— by varying the proportion of starter to flour.”
Early the next day, Racine bakes and packages the bread and delivers it to Ruidoso. “At this point, I’m baking as much as I want to bake,” she said. “I want every loaf to be a good as it can be.” ?
Adobe Breadhouse breads are available at the End of the Vine, 2801 Sudderth, the Wild Herb Market, 1715 Sudderth and the Capitan Farmer’s Market (in summer). And in the French bakers’ tradition, when the bread’s gone, it’s gone.
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